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We love us some Plex here at MacLife.com, where we’ve converted an aging Mac mini into a fine home theatre server with a minimum of effort. Now that recent versions of the Plex application have separated the server software from the client software, all sorts of goodies have been coming — such as DLNA streaming support with a new server update this week.
The wizards at Plex have announced a new Plex Media Center 0.9.6.0 beta release on Thursday which adds support for the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) streaming standard. While that may not sound so exciting in and of itself, DLNA brings a variety of new options for Plex lovers, including streaming to many HDTVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles such as the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
“This DLNA server can do things that no other DLNA server on the planet can do,” the Plex team writes on their blog. “And the coolest part is that with this new release, all the content served up by your Plex Media Server is now accessible by an insane amount of new devices, including ones that may already be in your homes (your LG washing machine doesn’t have DLNA? Send it back!).”
Of course, no recent Plex client would be complete without myPlex queue support, which allows you to save online videos and watch them at your leisure or share them with friends. Channels, Direct Play and Direct Streaming is also available for clients that support them, and the new Plex Media Server makes the best use of available metadata regardless of which client it’s serving to.
Now for the less-good news: The team warns this is only an initial release, so expect bugs along the way. It’s only available for Mac or Windows at the moment (the Linux server is still being tweaked), and your mileage may vary depending upon which DLNA-compatible device you’re using, but the blog details how you can help make new devices compatible by providing profiles to Plex. Finally, subtitles aren’t working at all over DLNA at the moment, should that be something you absolutely desire.
To download the Plex Media Server 0.9.6.0 beta, head over the Plex for Mac downloads page and give it a shot — the beta is the third item down on the page!
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